


come get y'all soup

by darlingofdots



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Domesticity, Fifth House appreciation hours, Gen, Sickfic, i just want somebody to be nice to my girls, set during GtN, this is extremely self-indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26322310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: ‘They brought soup, Nonagesimus. There is literally nothing nefarious about soup. They’re being nice.’ Gideon crossed her arms across her chest, even though Harrow couldn’t see her. ‘I know you normally live off cobwebs and the souls of the innocent, but would it kill you to let someone help you out just once?’The Ninth House has the flu, and Magnus brought soup.ORThese poor kids have it rough and you cannot tell me Abigail and Magnus' substitute parental figure instincts did not kick in within five minutes of realising that(There's some vomiting in this sorry)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 128





	come get y'all soup

**Author's Note:**

> AU in which NOBODY DIES because I said so, okay???

‘She has,’ Palamedes declared, polishing his glasses on a corner of Camilla’s robes, ‘the flu.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Gideon. ‘That’s stupid.’

The Sixth necromancer shrugged. ‘The flu is not famous for its intellectual gravity.’

Gideon glanced at the bony pile of misery that was the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, sprawled in the musty canopy bed, who was managing a really impressive death glare despite her runny nose and wheezing breath. ‘She’s never had the flu.’ Half of Drearburh might be in a constant state of dying of pneumonia, but nothing as pedestrian as _the flu_ would ever deign to lay low the Lady of the Ninth House.

‘Well,’ Palamedes said, now stacking his weird assortment of instruments back into his bag, ‘she has it now. Make sure she gets enough rest and fluids and it should sort itself out.’

As he turned to leave, his cavalier raised her eyebrows at Gideon with a look that conveyed both commiseration and something like scorn, as if it was Gideon’s fault that Harrow was sick. Gideon found that a bit unfair. As far as she was told before she agreed to this insane cavalier business, her job was to not get in Harrow’s way and, fine, keep her safe, but from like, assassination attempts. You couldn’t stab the flu with a sword, not even a rapier.

On the bed, Harrow gave a wheeze that indicated she might be about to speak, so Gideon closed the door behind the Sixth and went to stand by her adept’s shoulder. The Reverend Daughter had blown her nose so many times that she had wiped all the paint away and the skin underneath was red and a bit raw. She did look awful. ‘That was out of order, Griddle,’ she said. And coughed. ‘I do not need a Sixth House librarian to poke at me. I am fine.’

‘Like hell you are,’ Gideon said. ‘You kept me up all night with your coughing and you didn’t even check if I was wearing paint when I left to get breakfast. I was, by the way. And the Sixth are alright. Palamedes isn’t going to jump you in the dark and, I don’t know, extract your spleen through your ear.’

‘He doesn’t have to,’ Harrow said. And coughed. ‘If you give him an excuse to come in here to poison me.’

Gideon rolled her eyes so hard she briefly wondered if you could strain something that way. ‘Even if he wanted to do that, which he doesn’t, by the way, that would have been a bit bloody obvious of him, since half of Canaan House saw him come down here with me, so he’d be the number one suspect if you suddenly croaked, wouldn’t he?’

Harrow opened her mouth to protest. And coughed. Gideon grabbed the cup from the nightstand and went to get her necromancer some water. She had to haul the other girl up to sit by her creepy black robes to drink, because the skeletal arms she’d summoned that morning to keep her upright had creaked ominously under the weight of Harrow’s birdlike torso and one of the ulnae had cracked in half. Harrow had given herself a nosebleed trying to fix it until Gideon had given in and helped her by stacking lumpy pillows at her back.

When Harrow had gotten her breath back, she said, haughtily: ‘You’re being very… protective.’ And coughed.

‘Yeah, well. Don’t get used to it.’ Gideon hated to admit it but she hated seeing Harrow so pathetic. It was _weird_. Necros were supposed to be thin and bony and have noodles for arms, it was part of the aesthetic, but this was taking it a bit far. Besides, Harrow didn’t pull off that half-dead pallor nearly as beautifully as Dulcinea, who managed to make it look kind of soft and delicate. Harrow was still all angles and edges and rattling oss bracelets, looking like she could cut glass with the points of her elbows.

There was a knock at the door. Gideon laid Harrow back down into the pillows (resisting the urge to drop her like a mouldy snow leek) and went to open it, expecting the Sixth; it was Magnus the Fifth instead, carrying a tray with two bowls of soup, and his scholarly wife, both smiling brightly. ‘Heard the Ninth were feeling a bit under the weather,’ Magnus said, valiantly pretending not to notice the very slapdash job Gideon had done with her paint which made her look like a melting black skull, ‘and didn’t want you to miss lunch.’

‘Not to be indelicate,’ Abigail Pent said, leaning around her husband, ‘but being sick is hell on a necromancer, and Lady Harrowhark doesn’t look like she’s got much reserve to draw on.’ She gave Gideon a kindly smile.

Gideon shut the door.

‘Under no circumstances —’ Harrow started from her pile of mouldering pillows in the other room. And coughed. ‘I will not allow more strangers into this room, sticking their noses into Ninth business —’

‘They brought soup, Nonagesimus. There is literally nothing nefarious about _soup_. They’re being _nice_.’ Gideon crossed her arms across her chest, even though Harrow couldn’t see her. ‘I know you normally live off cobwebs and the souls of the innocent, but would it kill you to let someone help you out just once?’

‘You’re someone, Nav. You can bring me soup.’

Gideon poked her head around the corner into Harrow’s room. ‘Nonagesimus. I totally cannot. I may not be malingering in bed like her macabre majesty, but I went to throw up in the bathroom _twice_ while the Sixth were here, and if I don’t get to lie down real soon, I think my head is going to explode into pieces so small even you can’t put me back together.’

Harrow blinked at her with those voidlike eyes. Underneath her flaking paint, she was fever-flushed. Her cavalier raised an eyebrow. ‘Fine,’ Harrow said. And coughed. ‘Fine. But if they start poking around, I will hold you personally responsible.’

She could probably survive that, Gideon figured, given Harrow’s current condition. She’d tried to kill her dozens of times before and never managed yet; Gideon would take her chances. She turned around and opened the door again, relieved that the Fifth were still there, still smiling. She stepped back to let them in. They must have heard the Ninth talking through the door — it really wasn’t that thick — but were too tactful to say anything about the convenient flexibility of Gideon’s vow of silence. It was a damn miracle that she’d been able to keep this up for so long.

Lady Abigail barely raised an eyebrow at the various bits of bone scattered around the room; her husband swallowed once, audibly, before thrusting the tray in Gideon’s direction. ‘Nothing special,’ he said, ‘used up all my best stuff on the anniversary dinner. But there’s nothing like soup to pick you up when you’re down, my mother used to say.’

Gideon had learnt enough about non-Ninth House cooking by now to know that what Magnus the Fifth was offering was probably, by other people’s standards, quite bland. Unfortunately Gideon had spent her entire life on snow leeks, boiled soft and grey, and grey instant porridge with grey nutri-paste, so the waft of steam rising from the bowls under her nose kicked down the doors of her septal cartilage, launched an assault on her olfactory neurons, and sent her back to the bathroom floor to dry-heave over the toilet bowl. There wasn’t much left in her to throw up, which sucked spectacularly; she retched up some stomach acid that burnt in her mouth and pulled a muscle in her left shoulder and waited for it to stop. She almost jumped out of her skin when something touched her shoulder, hand twitching for her rapier, but it was only Magnus.

‘There, there,’ he said, a little clumsily. ‘I don’t know what they teach you youngsters these days, I’m always having to tell Jeannemary — cavaliers get sick too, you know, and you’re of no use to anyone — here, rinse your teeth, that’s better, up you go —’

She couldn’t fault him for not being intimidated by her anymore. Very few people looked threatening while they puked their guts out, skull paint or no skull paint, and Gideon probably wasn’t one of them. The Fifth cav hauled her up by her elbows, staggering a little under her weight, and led her to the cot at the foot of the big bed where Harrow was begrudgingly spooning soup into her mouth. Abigail sat on the edge of the bed, the tray in her lap, fussing with the cuffs of her jacket. The cot creaked when Gideon sat down, and all the bedding was in her nest in the other room but she barely noticed or cared at this point.

Once, when they were children, Harrow had ambushed her on the way back from a lesson with Aiglamene, waiting around a corner and throwing up three fully-articulated skeleton constructs as Gideon walked past. She’d been dog-tired from practice, already sore, and nine years old, and she hadn’t even noticed the splinter of a rib lodged in her forearm until days later when the arm was swollen and hot to the touch. If she’d told someone, she would have had to explain why she’d been fighting skeletons, and at nine Gideon knew with absolute certainty that Harrowhark Nonagesimus would not be the one facing punishment if she tattled, so she ignored it for two more days until the splinter was well and truly infected, and she’d been well and truly miserable. One of the horrid nuns had dug it out of her arm and washed the wound out with some foul-smelling antiseptic, but it had taken a while for the infection to clear out properly and Gideon had spent most of that time flat on her back in her cell, pressing the arm to the freezing walls for relief, alternately plotting vengeance and escape that never came to fruition, mostly just feeling sorry for herself.

She felt a bit like that now, as if her actual fucking bones were hot and heavy and somehow itchy, sick to her stomach and just really, _really_ done with this shit. Having the flu, it turned out, did not spark joy.

‘Well,’ she heard Abigail whisper, ‘I suppose it’s inevitable, when your House hasn’t had contact with anyone else for half a decade. Poor dears.’

Gideon had never been called any kind of dear. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She rested her head against the foot of Harrow’s bed, not sure if she could stay upright without support. The room was spinning a bit. Someone ought to tell the Fifth thank you, probably, that sounded like something people did when someone was kind to them, and she didn’t think Harrow was going to, but saying ‘thank you’ definitely fell under talking, and Gideon had already fucked up by talking to the Master Warden and his disapproving cav —

She pulled herself together enough to crane her head to check on her adept, who had finished her soup and pulled the covers up over her face, but seemed to still be breathing, which was a start. Magnus caught her looking, and said: ‘I think she’s asleep, kid’ and then: ‘Ninth, I mean,’ and Gideon didn’t know how she felt about _that_ , either.

‘Tell you what,’ Abigail suggested, returning from the other room with Gideon’s blankets. ‘You lie down for a bit, and I’ll keep an eye on the Reverend Daughter for you. I swear on my House and on the King Undying no harm will come to her, from me or mine, and we’ll see how you both feel in the morning.’

Harrow wouldn’t accept that, she was fairly sure, but Harrow was asleep and also paranoid, and Gideon’s brain was throbbing in time with her pulse. She met Abigail’s gaze, and nodded once in what she hoped signalled agreement, and lay down on the cot which was frankly too short for her and only marginally more comfortable than her nest on the floor, barely noticing Magnus draping a blanket over her. By the time her head hit the pillow, she was out like a light.

##

Gideon woke once during the night, shivering, to a soft hand on her forehead and a quiet voice saying ‘she’s still burning up,’ and then ‘go back to sleep, dear,’ and someone tucked in the blanket around her shoulders. Gideon, who thought the entire decrepit population of Drearburh would sprain something from laughing if someone implied Gideon Nav was anything like obedient, went back to sleep.

##

When she woke up properly to muggy light streaming in through the windows and a dull ache in her skull, Camilla the Sixth was lounging insolently in the only chair in the stuffy bedroom, reading something heavy and complicated. ‘You slept for fifteen hours,’ she announced when Gideon sat up on the creaking cavalier’s cot. ‘And you look like shit.’

Gideon swiped at her hair, sticky and gross with sweat and sacramental paint. ‘Great, thanks.’ Her hands, she noted with extreme annoyance, were shaking and weak. Not just her hands, if she was honest, but she pushed to her feet anyway and managed to stay upright on the second try.

Harrowhark was sitting up in bed, looking marginally less dead than yesterday, and engaged in a raspy debate with Palamedes Sextus about something that Gideon wasn’t even going to try and understand. ‘That is entirely beside the point,’ the Reverend Daughter crackled, her shoulders so tight she might have snapped herself in half. ‘If the intention of the exercise is to initiate a thalergy cascade, the revivification period can’t be longer than…’

‘They’ve been at it a while,’ Camilla said. ‘We only stopped by to check you were still breathing.’

It was a good sign that Harrow could argue with someone who wasn’t Gideon (she’d never lacked the energy to argue with Gideon and would probably spend her last breath on telling Gideon she was an idiot). Judging by the tone of the debate and the sheen of sweat on her necromancer’s face, Gideon reckoned she had about ten minutes. Still shaky like a newborn animal, she picked her way to the bathroom which — thank God — did not smell of vomit, and spent too long under the sonic with her back against the wall to keep from sliding down to the tiled floor like a wet ragdoll. When she came back out, face painted to the bare minimum with broad uneven lines and the hood of her robes down, the Fifth had brought breakfast up from the hall and were setting the only table in the Ninth quarters; they didn’t speak, but the way they moved around each other made it clear they had done this hundreds of times before. Abigail placed a small basket of bread rolls in the middle of the table and tossed one at her husband, who caught it in mid-air with much better reflexes than he’d exhibited with a rapier, grinning at his wife.

‘Aah, Ninth,’ Magnus said when he noticed Gideon in the doorway, ‘welcome back to the land of the living.’ He smiled at her like he always smiled. ‘We thought we’d spare you the trip down for breakfast. You’ll both feel better when you’ve had something to eat.’

For the next half hour, Gideon mechanically chewed and swallowed whatever Abigail deposited on her plate, and had the strangely satisfying pleasure of watching Camilla the Sixth bully her necromancer into consuming what she considered a reasonable amount of food. He and Harrow were still arguing, but where Harrow had apparently learnt to eat and talk at the same time (despite the coughing fits), Palamedes kept dropping his bread to gesture with a knife, which Camilla would grab before he could take someone’s eye out and then, hand circling her necro’s wrist, she would put the bread back into his hand and glare at him until he’d taken at least two bites, ducking his head. It was a slow process, but like the Fifth, one that seemed well-rehearsed, like they’d been doing it for years. Abigail Pent sipped her cup of tea, occasionally joined the debate, and rested her head on Magnus’ shoulder.

Eventually, Harrow pushed her plate away and swayed to her feet, a bit green around the gills, and waved a bony hand in an imperious gesture Gideon understood to be addressed to her cavalier, so she helped Harrow back to bed with considerably more care than when she’d had to drag her unconscious body out of the Facility, because Palamedes and Camilla might know she was a fake and Dulcinea had caught her out handling the stupid rapier wrong, but the Fifth didn’t have to join the list. Even if they’d brought breakfast. And frankly been nicer to Gideon than anyone else in her life, ever.

She slept through most of that day, too, because the walls wouldn’t stop tilting and her whole body ached in time with her pulse and staring at the ceiling only made her dizzier. Camilla poked her awake at some point to peer at her tongue and eyes, and Harrow still coughed and sniffed up in the mouldering expanse of her bed. Gideon decided, annoyed with herself, to keep a closer eye on her in the future so they could avoid some of the melodrama and that Harrow would properly thank the Fifth House for their help even if — and she could not suppress the satisfaction at the mental image of this — Gideon had to drag her bodily, kicking and screaming, through the halls of Canaan House to do it.

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to whoever gave me the zombie flu that was passing around my uni campus in February of 2016, it was truly a shit time
> 
> this is my first time writing in this fandom! my brain has been hyperfocusing for the last two weeks and it had to come out at some point. i'm on tumblr @ scesisonomaton, come hang out


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